October 2012

October 31, 2012

7 Days, 7 Artists, 7 Rings, is a living, responsive work of
art created by Rebecca
Campbell and Nicole
Walker. Each week the painter and poet, respectively, alternate
kicking off the current week’s collaborative artist project. Painters and
poets, photographers and essayists, musicians and story writers link their works. For example, a poet may be presented with a video and asked to write a poem in response; the poem in turn is shown to an artist, and the chain continues. The responses came daily, with
artists having only twenty-four hours of rtesponse time. Begun in 2010 and reprised in 2011, the
project is archived here (or at htttp://bekandnik.wordpress.com.) Ms Campbell and Ms Walker plan a new round of Telephone to start soon. -- DL.

In my childhood in Beverly Hills California, where our storms tended toward fire and quake, Los Angeles poet Myra Cohn Livingston served as Artist in our schools. Her first lesson was to use our real eyes, rather than to "buy in" to other people's metaphors and similes. She liked to remind us that "snow" wasn't "winter" in Southern California. I knew that if I "saw" the leaves turning something other than crinkly-and-brown, I should get my eyes checked.

On the other hand, she would bring in brilliant objects and ask us to come up with lists...what are they? what are they to us metaphorically? We would take metaphor-hunting walks. We would find the telephone in the seashell, the moon "as the north wind's cookie." (That last is Vachel Lindsay, in case you were wondering.)

And she would read us poems, across time, across space, from a stream she knew where poetry was always happening inside itself. A famous children's poet, she didn't believe in talking down to children. Her anthologies still sit on my shelves, and are of interest to my 43 year old self.

Her anthologies for children (among her more than 90 books), always included international work, spanning six centuries or more. Here for Halloween are some selections from Why Am I Grown So Cold: Poems of the Unknowable (A Margaret K. McElderry Book, Athenaeum, 1982).

October 30, 2012

Yesterday, I posted here about the devotional mode in poetry and my forthcoming anthology, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and featured two poems from the anthology. Today, I'd like to highlight the work of two additional poets from the anthology about whose work I am very enthusiastic.

As far as I can tell, Patrice de la Tour du Pin has been little known in the U.S., but thanks to the efforts of poet and translator Jennifer Grotz, he has begun to reach an English-language audience in literary journals, and will continue to do so in Grotz's translation of his collection Psaumes de tous mes temps [Psalms of All My Days], forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013.

Patrice de la Tour du Pin (1911–1975) was a French, Catholic poet who achieved fame for individual collections of poems as well as Une Somme de poésie, a three-volume multi-genred work he wrote and continually revised throughout his life. Late in his career, de la Tour du Pin distilled and collected his most powerful lyrical poems, written in the form of psalms, into Psaumes de tous mes temps [Psalms of All My Days]. As Jennifer Grotz says, "These psalms articulate his struggle to find poetic authority and spiritual meaning in the midst of world war and modern tumult." I'm thrilled to be able to include four of de la Tour du Pin's psalms in Poems of Devotion, and I'd like to share one of them with you here. More of Grotz's translations of de la Tour du Pin's work can be found online at Blackbird.

PATRICE DE LA TOUR DU PIN

Psalm 41*

My God, I know only my debt,all my life carried in debt--and you who repay it in a word!

Forgive me my shamelessness:you who have hedged me in from all directions at once,deliver me in time for your day of rest.

Set the night sky back in motion,reweave the constellationsinto a scaffold for your praise.

On that day when you judgethe taste of my joy with your lips,my sorrow at your Passion,

will you be able to say: “Here is a man who valued me over thirty radiant ideas”?

October 29, 2012

A certain kind of irony is fashionable in contemporary American poetry. The kind of irony I mean is a tonal façade of disaffection, of jadedness. Read a handful of the thousands of literary magazines or books of poetry published in the U.S. every year, and you’re sure to encounter it frequently. The underlying tenet seems to be that sincere expressions of emotion have to be balanced with a significantly greater amount of pretending to have little investment in the subject at hand. I imagine that this has come about out of fear of the sentimentality we often associate with previous eras, but also out of the effort to sound “contemporary”—and, problematically, it seems that we as a literary culture have a rather narrow notion of what it means to sound that way.

I see this fashion as no more than that—a fashion, and certainly not a necessity, as critics and poets have so often implied in recent years.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a more useless, even counter-productive, dictum than Arthur Rimbaud’s famous “Il faut être absolument moderne” [“One must be completely modern”].

The problem is this: One is inherently a product of one’s time. If a poet or artist consciously attempts to “be” modern (or postmodern, or contemporary, or whatever term you prefer), she or he is simply attempting to conform to a necessarily simplistic notion of the characteristics she or he associates with the fashions of the era. Perhaps a more useful directive can be found in Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica”: “a poem should not mean / but be.”

While not everyone will find this prevalent mindset as troubling as I do, I think it bears reflection. What are we writing? How are we going about it? What unexamined assumptions are informing the way we write?

I don’t mean to imply that the particular kind of irony under discussion cannot produce great work. I think immediately of W. H. Auden, a real master of irony. I think of Elizabeth Bishop’s hot-to-the-touch “One Art.” I think of Dean Young’s work, which is full of this irony of disaffection, and at its best is heartbreakingly beautiful. But when ironic distance becomes the default modus operandi among so many poets, it’s time to call it into question, and perhaps it’s time to leave behind this self-imposed restriction. Irony is no more modern/postmodern/contemporary than sincerity. Irony does not make a poem “relevant” or “up-to-date.” And yet these assumptions seem to underlie much of what is being written today.

Though irony is so prevalent in contemporary poetry, thankfully the body of work being produced transcends even the most widespread fashions. The poetic mode that most interests me is what I would call devotional—a mode to which the kind of irony I’ve been discussing is usually antithetical. The term devotional has unfortunately become associated with greeting-card or “inspirational” verse, which is typically doggerel infused with cliché sentiments of appreciation, encouragement, or consolation, and/or overly simplistic religious ideas. This is decidedly not what I mean by the term devotional poetry.

In my introduction to my forthcoming anthology, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, I offer a detailed explanation of the devotional mode, as I see it. Here, it will suffice to say that the quintessential devotional poem is one in which the process of composition is itself an attempt to relate to the divine, however one defines it. The reader will not know for certain, of course, how a poem was composed, but those poems that give us the sense that they are proceeding in uncertainty—not only of literary or aesthetic outcome, but also of spiritual outcome—should be included in this mode.

The best TV commercial of the year is Direct TV's "Don't attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley." The cause-and-effect sequence -- "when you wait forever for the cable guy you get bored, when you get bored you stare out the window, when you stare out the window you see things you shouldn't see, when you see things you shouldn't see you need to vanish" -- creates a rapid absurdist narrative Don Draper would have liked. The clauses escalate: "when you need to vanish, you fake your own death" (with a picture of a man surfacing in the ocean, a burning ship in the distance), then "you dye your eyebrows," and finally the coup de grace: "you attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley." The specificity of this name is a nifty touch. I wonder whether it's the name of a guy at the ad agency.

The worst TV commercial of the year -- take it from one who has watched too many baseball and football games this fall -- is a forty-way tie among car commercials that use the fake word "introducing." Even a commercial for Mercedes, with Jon Hamm's voice over it, is guilty of this triteness next to which the cliches of car ads from the print magazines of yore ("runs good," "loaded") seem amost OK.

The weirdest commercial of the year is, hands down, the one from Direct TV featuring a blonde wife emerging from the shower, wrapped in a towel, looking distraught. The huge TV screen on the wall reports a "recording conflict." (Apparently the household cable TV system can record one show at any given time.) She says she is "sick of this thing," adding, "I just feel like it's watching me walk around naked." Snarls hubby, in front of the bathroom mirror, "Well, at least somebody gets to." Then he continues brushing his teeth, noisily, the noise communicating his contempt. The idea of a "recording conflict" -- and of warring TV tastes -- as emblematic of a marriage on the rocks is smart, but the use of a bitterly quarreling couple to sell a product is negativity of a kind usually seen only in political ads. Still, it does a lot in fifteen seconds, and it does not involve a talking animal. -- DL

October 28, 2012

This week we welcome Luke Hankins as our guest blogger. Luke is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions (Wipf & Stock, 2011), and the translator of I Was Afraid of Vowels...Their Paleness (Q Ave. Press, 2011), poems from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. He is the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock, forthcoming Nov. 30, 2012) and serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review.
He received his M.F.A. from Indiana University, where he held The Yusef
Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. His poems, essays, and translations
have appeared in numerous publications, including American Literary Review, New England Review, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media national radio program On Being.

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,
but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns
for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-
in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

(This poem first appeared in Poetry. Robert Bly selected it for The Best American Poetry 1999. -- sdh)

October 26, 2012

We've received a few comments in response to David's post about Jacques Barzun, who died on October 25th at the age of 104. Here's an excerpt from a piece by our friend Jamie Katz, who had the honor of toasting Barzun on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Follow the link to read more about this extraordinary scholar.

In his work I am struck, not just by his erudition and elegant prose,
but by his acknowledgement of fluidity, chance and human agency in
culture and history. It is a liberating conception, giving weight to
both daring leaps of individual genius and the smaller gestures and
habits that form the tissue of society. He gives respect to our
innermost selves, too. Speaking of Descartes and the split between
rationalism on one side and impulse and intuition on the other, Barzun
refuses to take sides: “The more science proves its worth, the harder it
is for ‘nature’ or ‘the heart’ to feel free. Reason should guide — all
moralists agree — but, as others point out, mind is not separate from
heart. The astute Chinese have a character for heart-and-mind. They
perceived that the urge to reason is itself a drive from the heart,
which explains why rationalists are often fanatics.”

I’m in Seattle
for AWP 2014 planning. The next AWP is
in Boston,
March 6-9, 2013. I am always telling
young poets that they should go to AWP.
Here’s why.

You meet lots of writers there and there’s nothing like
being in a bar and looking across at Yusef Komunyakaa or C.D. Wright to know
you are in the center of greatness.

The panels range from great poets and writers reading to how
literature is made to the network on which literature is built. As a young writer, you want to understand the
world in which you live. You want to
understand what literary magazines publish the work you publish, you want to
understand what presses publish the kind of work you write and you want to
understand what is going on in your own community.

But what is much more important is knowing what you can do
to be part of keeping that afloat. The
world of poetry and literature requires many players, and there is no reason
you can’t be one of them. Maybe you can
help a literary magazine or a reading series, maybe you can start your own
press, but find out a way to become part of the solution, not part of the
problem. And the problem is very simple
and has three parts.

There
are way more good manuscripts that want to be published than there are
writers to publish them.

There
are far more people writing and sending their words out into the world
than there are reading good work and buying books.

In
general, we need more intellectuals and readers. That might require
writing more poetry that people can actually understand. Poetry that isn’t just written for other
academics. Or not. Just know your audience.

These are the problems.
If you come to AWP with your poems, your stories, your stuff that you
want someone to help you out with, good luck.
Here is the story the gatekeepers want to hear. I like what you’re doing in the literary
world. I would love to be part of it.
What can I do to help? Once you
figure out where you fit in, what you can do to be part of the solution, then
you can start asking for something.

If what you want is a champion, then champion somebody
yourself. And when you do get a book
accepted, create a marketing/publicity plan that includes going to AWP and
selling books and making sure you get the word out there.

Remember that it is not about you. Or at least not just you. Writers needs to
have a community to sustain them.
Writers should work on being givers instead of takers, should work at being
less needy. Editors are not waiting
around to find writers that we can do stuff for. We are trying to live.

So when I see you at AWP in Boston, tell me what you are doing for the
literary community. Tell me what you’re
doing to make magic happen.

Jacques Barzun, intellectual historian, legendary Columbia professor, mentor, essayist, man of letters, has passed away at the age of 104. Perhaps in an effort to point to his great versatility, the NY Times obit calls him a "cultural gadfly," which seems to me tonally wrong. No gadfly, he did not sting and fly away, in the manner of a satirist; his knowledge was as deep as his range was wide, and he brought the resources of an encyclopedic mind to the least of his endeavors.

No one else could have written -- and published at the age of 93 -- a magisterial cultural history of Europe, with a driving thesis embedded in the very title of the book: "From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present." As a professor he crossed disciplinary boundaries with enviable ease -- if he taught you Romanticisim you were exposed to history, music, philosophy, art, and literature; you put in time with Berlioz, Rousseau, Delacroix, Shelley, Coleridge, Goethe, Carlyle, Stendhal, and the world historical individual personified in the emperor of France -- and you understood the ways the 19th century deviated from the classical and swerved into the modern.

For many years Barzun and Lionel Trilling team-taught Columbia's senior "great books" seminar, which met one night a week and was arguably the crowning glory of a Columbia education. Trilling and Barzun were different in temperament and taste. As writers and scholars they used totally different strategies, rhetorical and methodological, to attack a subject. Yet they were able to air their intellectual disagreements with civility founded on fondness as well as respect. They complemented each other beautifully in dialogue and had a shared penchant for off-the-cuff wordplay. One evening Malthus's dire predictions of runaway population growth were under discussion. Trilling ventured, "honi soit qui Malthus pense." To which Barzun replied without missing a beat, "honi soit qui mal thus puns." Students lucky enough to have taken the Colloqium on Important Books, as it was called, still spoke about it, with ardor and awe, thirty or forty years later.

When, working as Trilling's research assistant, I decided to make the prose poem the center of my doctoral thesis, Trilling suggested I meet with Barzun and he arranged the interview. Not only was Barzun encouraging; he pointed me in so many fruitful directions -- from Macpherson's "Ossian" to Leigh Hunt to the prosopopoeia as a rhetorical device -- that I walked away in that state of intellectual agitation that bodes well for a critical undertaking even as it vastly complicates it.

I turned again to Professor Barzun when, a decade later, I set out to write a book on murder mysteries. At Cambrdge University, I had written my master's essay on detective novels. Now, in 1985, I wrote a Newsweek cover story on the subject and landed a book contract. Long a fan of Jacques' great "Catalogue of Crime," done collaboratively with Wendell Taylor, and containing thousands of annotated entries on detective novels and stories, I wrote to him, and met with him for a luxuriant hour of conversation in his midtown office. The single-space, two-page letter he sent me touched on Voltaire's "Zadig," the relation of detection to science, the development of the Surete in France, the reason for the genre's highbrow appeal, among other things. Barzun said that criminal anguish was something that could be done well by Dostoyevsky but was usually fatal in lesser hands. The first-person murder mysery, he smiled, "must be a foresight saga." It was quite a session. "The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection" owes much to Professor Barzun.

Though Barzun in "Meditations on the Literature of Spying"
(1965) reveals that he has little affection for Cold War developments in the espionage
genre, he makes a number of observations that I find suggestive, impressive, and useful. For example, he
connects the success of the genre at the time of his writing -- the time
of James Bond on one hand and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold on the other -- to "the multiform attack on privacy" that causes vast amounts of anxiety in the populace. Barzun goes further:

<<Psychoanalysis has taught even the common man that he is
in some ways an impostor; he has spied on himself and discovered reasons
for distrust and disgust: in all honesty he cannot turn in a good
report. Nor do his surroundings help to restore his confidence. The
world is more and more an artifact, everywhere facsimiles supplant the
real thing -- the raucous radio voice, the weird TV screen. Just to find
his bearing he must fashion a computer simulation of his case. So
mimicry, pretending, hiding, which are part of the child's first nature
and used to be sloughed off as true individuality developed, now stay
with us as second nature, and indeed as the only escape from the bad
self and the bad world.>>

This is brilliantly put and one has to rub one's eyes a little
recalling that the essay, so predictive of intellectual conversation to
come, appeared back in the Spring 1965 issue of The American Scholar. While
Barzun broadcasts his irritation with the espionage genre, at least he
pays it the compliment of calling it, in his title, "the literature of
spying," which is no mean thing in his book. -- DL

October 25, 2012

Los Angeles will soon have its first city laureate. It’s a great honor for a city to have a poet
laureate, and in the process of choosing someone, what we on the committee
found out was that L.A.
is crowded with poets. There are poets
on the streets, poets in the classrooms, poets who don’t leave their houses
much, poets who like to write on beaches.
There are poets who try for quantity, who seem to have simply reams of
work stacked about them taking up the house and shelf space and even sitting in
the kitchen where the little pots and pans ought to be and poets who limit
themselves to one or two good poems a year.
There are different kinds of poets and there are different kinds of
poems. Just like you listen to certain
music when you’re sad and some when you’re happy.

There are poems which
like to stand up and sing out loud.
(Like I do in the shower! I’m amazing!
You should hear me.) Or poems that sit quietly in a corner and weep. The kind of poetry I am drawn to the most is
the smart poetry, the poetry you can’t stop thinking about, the poems that come
back to you in the middle of the night.

When I go to readings of
my favorite poets, I hope they will read certain poems. When Jim Tilley reads there is this poem he
has about the big questions. I like it
very much because I always end up spinning off thinking about what the big
questions are and how when you’re in love, it’s tedious when you only have time
for bills and dinner and the kids and not time for the big questions.

When Eloise Klein Healy
reads, I want to hear the one about softball and the one about the bears and
the one about the swales of rain. And
when Doug reads I want that peppy poem about the Middle Passage. Charles Harper Webb has a poem on duct tape
that I wait for, and this coming Monday, Brendan Constantine reads at the
Gerding Theatre, I hope he will read the poem below which is one of my
favorites.

Last Night I Went to the Map
of the World and I Have Messages For You

Brendan Constantine

America says it has
misplaced your number.
I wasn’t comfortable giving it out. I said
I’d let you know.

Africa’s birthday is this weekend.
There’s a party. No gifts.
Just come.

If you’re
planning to go, Greece
wants
to know if it can get a lift. Awkwardly
so
does Turkey.

Russia wanted me to say The
worm knowsthe cabbage but the worm dies first.
I have no idea what that means. Do you?

Japan looked really uncomfortable all night
but never spoke. Is something going on?

Ireland asked to be remembered.
I sang to it for you.

I didn’t get to
connect with Europe
but, as the French say, Isn’t that just
too bad.

Is that
everyone? Oh yes, the oceans.
They asked what they always ask
and I promised I’d repeat it, Why do you never call?
When are you coming home?

Here is why I love this poem:

It
makes me think.

It makes me enter this big head space about us and them.

I love thinking about nation vs. human

Brendan’s Greek and I know that Greek/Turkey line is a kick for
him.

It’s about the big ideas of life.

Singing to Ireland.

Mostly because I like very much to think about home. In its largest sense and smallest sense,
its wildest and its safest.
Everything about what it means to be home, to feel at home, to
build a home, to make a home, to nest.

Writing good poetry is
like falling through air. Not
water. Because water stops you. Water slows you down. Water makes you think about whether you
really want to keep going down. Water is
all free fall; water lets you go down deeply.
Deeply into words, language and ideas.

Tess Gallagher eloquently
wrote,

“I Stop Writing the Poem”

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

Why do we stop writing
the poem? We stop to work. We stop to arrange the clothing. To arrange the sandwiches on a plate, laying
out the cilantro and parsley. Sliced red
onions, peppers, olives. Then back to
poem and if we’re not lucky, the poem may be lost, may have scurried away and
hidden among the dirty linens.

Women start with being
women. We start with our children. All else is small, and insignificant compared
to this: How are my children? Is my relationship with my children
sustained? We bring together the arms of
the shirt, of the pants, of the giant life we have with our children and feel
it hinging and unhinging. You cannot be
a successful poet, writer or even person and lose your relationship with your
children. That’s key, and yet, we want
our poetry to achieve a level of mastery.
Not craft. Not clean loving well
laid lines. Not something that runs out
of an MFA program perfect and sweet. No,
poetry that has plenty to do. Poetry
that can stop tenderness and get to the other side. Poetry that’s the small girl wanting to grow
up and the woman wishing for a dress so that she can seduce the waiters.

It’s different being a
woman writer. But should it be? Women, if they are not careful are ghost
writers. They can write standing up
straight and beautiful against the sky, and their words can remain
invisible. We need to write so we’re not
left out in the cold. We need to write
the big stories. Not the domestic
stories, the enormous stories that flatten myths.

Poetry that’s outside the
lines. That’s wild. That has a job to do. No matter who lives or who dies.

Tess Gallager will be
reading at the Red Hen Press reading at the Gerding Theatre at 8 pm with Caleb
Barber, Brendan Constantine and Tanya Chernov.

October 23, 2012

Writing poetry well should be like training yourself for the
Olympics. The poetry Olympics. Even there are no gold medals, no silver or
bronze, even though there are no endorsements, (I keep writing to Nike, “I run,
I write poetry, give me shoes! But no luck.) even though the rewards of poetry
are being able to go around saying, “I’m a poet,” which, if you throw in a couple
dollars will get you coffee, in spite of that, you should take it
seriously.

For me, that means doing what they do in the Olympics, going
through training. When I meet with MFA
students, they want to know how long it will take before they get their first
book published. Here’s what I think
about: When my kids were in karate, their
teacher Ken Nagayama would say, “When an American enters the dojo, he likes to
ask one question. ‘How long will it take
for me to get a black belt?’ That is not the right question. That is not right thinking. Right thinking is, ‘Is this a place where I
can enter the lifelong study of martial arts and learn about what it means to
be human using this art form?’ That is the right question.”

Can I enter the study of poetry here? Is the right place for me at this time? Are there poets I can learn from? Red Hen Press has a list of about twenty core
poets who know we have a slot for them every several years so they can focus on
writing knowing their work has a home.
This list includes Percival Everett, Peggy Shumaker, Camille Dungy, Doug
Kearney, David Mason, Cynthia Hogue, Jim Tilley, Kim Dower and Lisa C. Krueger.

We have three poets who have undertaken to enter the dojo of
poetry and let the martial arts instructor take some serious swings at their
work. Lisa C. Krueger, who read last
month at Poets House with David St. John and Phil Levine had two books out but
wanted to see how daring and risk taking she could be with her third book. She enrolled in the Bennington MFA
program. As an adult with a thriving Psychotherapy
practice, it isn’t easy to become a student again, to submit to having your
poetry—which feels like your children!—be whacked around by the throngs, to say
nothing of the poets who lead the workshops, but that’s what she’s done. The poems that have emerged are ferocious,
they have bite and wild as if they were surrounded by wolves and learned to
speak anyway.

Jim Tilley retired from Morgan Stanley and dedicated himself
to a life of language and ideas, but first to poetry. He’s been to Breadloaf, to Squaw, to Palm Beach, and he keeps
going. Every summer. He works on his craft as hard as he ever
worked in the world of finance, and the result is amazing. Poems that walk
between math, light and energy. Poems
that are precise and balanced, poems where the poet is paying attention to
every word.

Kim Dower, a renowned publicist went back to poetry after an
absence of twenty-five years and dedicated herself to attending the conferences
where she could submit her poems to criticism.
She takes classes with Terry Wolverton, one of Los Angeles’ treasures both as poet and writing
teacher. Her second book, Slice of Moon will be out from Red Hen
Press next year, and she is reading this weekend on Saturday at the Ruskin Art
Club at 4 pm with Oliver de la Paz and Cynthia Hogue.

Red Hen’s core poets have this in common. They are not hoping for a black belt. They have entered the life of poetry and are
in there, in the muck and grime, the wet evenings, the long winters, the pages
on the floor. They’re not hoping for
game, they are the game. I salute all
poets who are in it for the long haul, for entering language cracked and
brittle and ending up with poems whole and humming.

I never saw a wild thingsorry for itself.A small bird will drop frozen dead from a boughwithout ever having felt sorry for itself.

Kenneth KochI Like Rats

I never saw a ratSorry for itself.I never saw two ratsConsoling one aniother for being rats.

Rats live good full rat-lives with other rats.Rat mind and rat heart plunge them into rat sex with other impassioned rats.People say they are poison and ugly and cause disease.I say people cause disease.I never caught a cold or syphillis or gonorrhea or manic depression from a rat.